The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

In the quest to post 50 entries in the month of January, I hurried up my reading schedule, neglected my family who I came home to visit, and finished up the final Lord of the Rings Book, The Return of the King. Let me just throw this out there to start with, I really really enjoyed it. It was definitely my favorite of the the three books (four if you count The Hobbit which was my least favorite). Except for the rare parts (epic battles and dead armies) where the movie surpassed the book, I thought the book was awesome. The story starts in Gondor with Gandalf and Pippin. You follow Pippin as he explores Gondor, becomes a servant of the crazy steward, befriends guards, and watches a battle begin. The detail in this section brings more to the story telling experience, and you really feel the uncertainty that is alive in Gondor. In the first part of the book, we also follow Merry and the men of Gondor, most notably, a masked rider, Dernhelm. You also see Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and other rangers from the North venture into the eerie Path of The Dead. As exciting as their story was, Merry and Pippin make this half of the book. Merry was a bad ass battle against the Nazgul and Pippin was doing what he could in Gondor to save Faramir. The aftermath of the battle and the true devastation from stabbing the Nazgul is shown as well, and this is one of a myriad of times we see how awesome Aragorn really is. Then the troop regroups to create a distraction for Frodo and Sam.

The second part of the book was also great in its own way. To my pleasure, Frodo and Sam were only the feature characters in a few chapters. Samwise is basically the man and helps Frodo do everything. Mordor really is disgusting and creepy. Frodo is being overtaken by the darkness. And Gollum plays his part. As we know, all is righted, and the company meet again. The journey home is awesome. We see Galadriel again. We see the Ents again; Treebeard is honestly one of my favorite characters in the book always "ho humming". My only disappointment was that we did not see Tom Bombadil again. (Side not: Arwen (Liv Tyler) is a super minor character in the entire trilogy, which is great, as Steve discussed already)

Here is where things got a little crazy and the movie did not include. Gandalf leaves the Hobbits, and they return to the Shire only to find it "ruffians" inhabiting it, and all sorts of not so Shire-y things going on. The Hobbits feel like they've experienced too much to deal with all the crap at the Shire and tear through everyone who tries to stop them. Merry and Pippin (still being awesome) are warriors and lead the charge against all the bad people lead by "the boss" and "sharkey". Low and behold, it's freaking Sauruman leading all the ruffians and creating havoc in the Shire. Frodo, being all peaceful, banishes him from the Shire. To everyone else's joy, Wormtail ends up stabbing him in the back (literally). Frodo falls off the face of the planet, and Samwise uses his magical elf soil to make the Shire prosper again. Then Frodo and Bilbo and the three elf ring bearers (Gandalf, Elrond, and Galadriel) sail off to the sea, which seems like ...heaven on earth...?

Anywho, the book was great. It was super detailed, but there was enough going on in the story, that it didn't feel long or drawn out. (There was a long appendix which I decided not to read, but who needs those anyway?) It was a fitting end to an adventure following a magic ring!